A Deep Dive into Measuring Employee Experience with Wyzetalk

Measuring emloyee experience and interpreting results is a key challenge for human resources leaders.

Meaningful employee engagement is the foundation of a thriving workplace but can be difficult to achieve.

In this article we share key metrics successful customers use and give insight into measuring intangibles that help build employee connection.

The Employee Experience Revolution

Employee experience encompasses an individual’s journey along various company touchpoints. What makes successful employee experience really powerful, is the benefits it brings to organisations, this includes:

  • Improved talent attraction and retention
  • Enhanced employer brand
  • Boosted company performance, and
  • Stronger employee engagement

For many employees their experience and workplace satisfaction are strongly intertwined. This means the emotional and psychological aspects of the employee experience are becoming more critical, as is measuring employee experience.

The Significance of Measuring Employee Experience and KPIs

Historically, company leaders have used intuition and extrapolation, to gauge the impact of employee experience. However, advancements in technology make it possible to devise metrics that generate quantifiable data to analyse employee experience.

A variety of experiential aspects, such as the workplace environment, emotional experience and social interactions, can be quantified. This leads to the establishment of metrics and KPIs, which indicate employee experience thresholds.

Our Employee Engagement Solution

We understand the power of world-class employee experiences. Our integrated digital employee engagement platform provides employees with easily accessible annual surveys, nimble pulse surveys and real-time team engagement zones.

The data derived from these interactions is transformed into tangible employee experiences – fostering improved experience and engagement.

Measuring Employee Experience and KPIs

The role that quantifiable KPIs can play in improving employee experience is often under-utilised. Why is this the case? Simply put, measuring employee experience is viewed by many as too difficult and ‘impossible’. In reality, our work with clients has shown us that creating and effectively measuring employee experience KPIs, is entirely achievable.

The key to success is developing metrics around key touchpoints that influence the employee experience. We’ve found the following metrics to be invaluable in this respect:

  • Employee net promoter scores (eNPS) – this tells a company whether an employee will recommend their employer to friends, former colleagues or family. The ‘net’ result of the score is calculated by subtracting promoters from detractors, to determine the eNPS and establish a KPI. On social media platforms like LinkedIn the scores companies receive influence their ‘attractiveness’ as an employer.
  • Employee satisfaction – personal happiness with respect to their work environment, remuneration, responsibilities and skills development, all play an important role in individual satisfaction.

At leading employers, annual satisfaction surveys have been replaced by pulse surveys. These surveys target various business units with specific questions related to their work. The result? Actionable insights that allow companies to quickly deal with issues and the creation of internal KPIs against which to judge progress.

  • Employee engagement

This reflects an employee’s commitment and connection to a company. Employee satisfaction and employee engagement are related. Satisfaction being an overarching sense of belonging and engagement delving deeper into a sense of purpose and alignment.

An employee engagement KPI reveals the emotional state of your company in relation to its mission. Additionally, it provides information on how strongly employees are identifying with company goals.

  • Absenteeism

Is employee absenteeism on the up? Are reasonable explanations for the upward trend hard to identify? It’s likely that further exploration is needed. In fact, absenteeism is a top indicator that an organisation’s overall employee experience is misfiring.

What to look out for when trying to make sense of absenteeism? In general, pulling together the metrics of several data pools will help you develop a KPI. Good options to explore are:

Wellness programmes

  • How frequently are these being accessed by employees?
  • Are issues like fatigue and stress being reported?
  • What is the organisational response to this development?

Productivity levels

  • Are these meeting expectations or are they trending lower?

Socio-economic conditions

  • What are the financial and home pressures your employees are dealing with?
  • The creation of ‘workplace personas’ can provide important insight in this respect.

Casting the net wide in an effort to find as much information as possible, is the best approach when dealing with absenteeism.

  • Employee turnover

Often closely related to issues of absenteeism, turnover rates are important benchmarking tools. At present turnover KPIs in South Africa are as follows:

  1. Retail and manufacturing has the highest permanent labour turnover by industry at 16.4%.
  2. Sales and marketing has the highest weighted analysis of the average labour turnover by discipline at 28%.
  3. Unskilled and defined decision-making occupations have an average labour turnover of 19.8%.
  4. Resignation accounts for 41.2% of the overall labour turnover average.

Understanding how your company is performing in relation to the rest of your industry is important. However, it is only part of the story. Smart business leaders work at keeping their company’s turnover rates several percentage points below industry averages. How do they achieve this? By building strong managerial competence, managing employee workloads, a culture of recognition and providing development opportunities.

  • Diversity

There is a growing body of evidence showing that companies with diverse workforces are outperforming their peers across a range of performance metrics. Diversity is often neglected by companies primarily because of a binary understanding of what it entails.

In reality, diversity manifests itself in numerous characteristics such as:

  • Race
  • Ethnicity
  • Age
  • Gender identification
  • Marital status
  • Language
  • Religion
  • Parental status
  • Physical ability
  • Mental aptitude

Simple steps like assessing company culture in light of an understanding of its current diversity metrics, is a good place to start. This puts the organisation on a path towards creating a sense of ‘belonging’, which is important for employee experience.

It’s crucial to understand that when measuring employee experience, it is best done by combining a wide range of overlapping metrics to gain a holistic picture.

Practical Impact of Measurinng Employee Experience

Cargill, the global food producer with 150 000 employees, moved towards the use of pulse surveys to explore workplace satisfaction and performance. Combining this with a strong ‘solutions’ orientation, resulted in almost 70% of employees noting improvement in workplace experience.

Similarly, the use of high frequency pulse surveys helped Adobe cut staff turnover by some 30% because the results allowed the company to quickly act on challenges. It also saved some 80 000 hours of annual performance reviews.

In practical terms much of the success that these two companies enjoyed occurred through data analysis and it’s important for companies to adhere to best practices in data management such as:

  • Ethical use – employing data for declared purposes only.
  • Secure storage – encrypting and managing data safety.
  • Legal compliance – using data within the relevant legal frameworks, and
  • Transparent conduct – communicating when and how data is collected and for what purposes.

Data, its collection and use are going to become vital determinants of business success. Establishing trust with employees will be vital for companies to ensure that they can access this resource.

Measuring Employee Experience and Data-Driven Decision Making

The utilisation of data for shaping employee experience strategies necessitates a strategic approach founded on the collection of data, meticulous analysis, and insightful interpretation. Activities that Wyzetalk is well versed in undertaking.

It’s imperative to bear in mind that while data serves as a compass for decision-making, its synergy with empathy, qualitative insights, and a comprehensive grasp of organisational culture and context remains indispensable.

Continuous Improvement

Employee experience is multifaceted, with different layers built upon each other via ongoing interactions. Continuous analysis is important to understand these interactions and the impact they have on employee experience initiatives.

Our employee experience solution assists companies in achieving their business objectives by providing a better understanding of the relationship between employee experiences and operational performance. Human resource leaders can quickly and easily obtain data on what motivates employees and what can be done to achieve better organisational alignment.

Challenges and Solutions

While the power of impactful employee experiences can literally transform organisations. There are some pitfalls companies should be aware of when crafting employee experience strategies, these include:

Misunderstanding employee needs – do you know what employees expect of their experience? Do you know why they are acting in a certain manner? Operating on assumptions is dangerous and can lead to inappropriate strategies. The solution lies in using digital platforms, which provide strong data analysis capabilities.

Misdirected measurement – are you measuring satisfaction levels? Do you know what your turnover and absenteeism rates are and how they compare with industry peers? What is success rate of your current talent retention programs? Without answers to these questions – which our class-leading platform can provide – you will never be sure of the success of your employee experience interventions.

Choosing the Right Technology

The importance of technology and using digital solutions that empower the employee experience cannot be overstated. Wyzetalk’s employee engagement platform is geared towards helping employees quickly and easily manage a vast array of administrative tasks, such as applying for leave, accessing shift schedules, and logging safety hazards in the workplace, for example.

Providing employees with experiences that improve employee productivity and add value to their personal experiences is a non-negotiable pillar of any employee experience initiative.

Key Takeaways

The worker-employer relationship is undergoing change and employee experience is central to this emerging dynamic. There is no single approach to employee experience management that will serve all companies equally. Instead, companies should focus on constantly monitoring key metrics and with the aid of industry benchmarks develop KPIs, which reflect not only workplace realities but cater to their business aspirations.

In order to measure employee experience and extract the most out of the data and variety of information sources available to them, companies that invest in user friendly digital platforms are going to be best positioned to capitalise on opportunities to improve their employee experience.

Talk to an expert about how to improve your employee experience.